A Christian Who No Longer Lives the Victory over Death
You would like to go to the Liturgy with joy, and it does not happen. You would like to stand in it with your whole being, but your mind wanders through worldly things, you count the minutes, and you feel an unconfessed relief when the end draws near. You receive Communion and you leave as you came: your heart unbroken, nothing felt to have changed, though you know you have received Everything. And the following Sunday you simply feel like staying home.
You are not an exception. The Christian of today confesses the Resurrection Sunday after Sunday, yet rarely lives any longer like a man who truly believes that death has been defeated. The services are held, the fasts are counted, the candles burn; the whole order is intact, and yet something is missing. Little is said about this absence, perhaps because it cannot be measured by anything that can be counted.
That this joy once existed is plain from the first Christian centuries, full of people who sang on their way to the wild beasts, who received their sentence as an honor, who died serene under the eyes of onlookers who understood nothing. This joy was a public fact, recorded by friends and enemies alike. It is no longer seen today, or is seen so rarely that it has become an exception where once it was the distinguishing mark of an entire people. The question is not whether it has been lost, but where it came from and by what door it left.
The Joy of a Discovery
The joy of the first Christians did not come from a cheerful temperament, nor from the warmth of the gathering. It sprang from one thing only, the deepest that can ever be told to a human being: death has been defeated.
Everything stands here, and here the Christian parts ways with the rest of the world. Whatever you do on earth, however much you achieve, the end is the same: you will die, you will be forgotten, and you will take nothing with you. The joy of wealth, of power, of honor lasts as long as life lasts and goes out with it. But if death has truly been defeated, if in its place now stand resurrection and life without end, then no earthly achievement can be set beside it. This is not a consolation for the weak; it is the one piece of news that changes everything from the foundation: the man who has learned that he will not truly die can no longer be saddened to the depths by anything.
That is why the Resurrection is the stone over which most people stumble. Nietzsche did not believe it, Cioran could not receive it, and most atheists do not part ways with morality — they stop precisely here: they cannot believe that death has been defeated, that there is life beyond it. Without the resurrection of Christ, everything is shut inside the tomb, and Christian joy is madness. With it, the tomb is empty, and joy is the only possible response. The first Christians did not rejoice because they were optimists by nature, but because they had discovered that the Crucified One is God and that, by rising, He trampled down death for all.
One thing more must be made clear, so that what follows is not misread. The joy we are speaking of can dwell even in a man who weeps. It is not a feeling of well-being that drives tears away, but something that fits inside them. The Fathers even called mourning “joy-making” — the sorrowful joy, charmolypē, in which repentance and hope are a single movement of the heart. Christian joy is the deep peace of the one who knows that death no longer has the last word. A saint may look grave, weary, even crushed, and yet carry the whole joy of the Resurrection. The one thing he cannot carry is despair.
The discovery that the Crucified One is God has a face and a voice in the Gospel. Its first full confession is not a catechism formula but the cry of a man touching the wounds and understanding: “My Lord and my God!” (John 20:28). For a Jew like Thomas, this sentence was the absolute earthquake — the name reserved for God, spoken to a man bearing the marks of the nails. And the one who confesses this can never remain the same: the Apostle Peter writes to Christians who had never seen Christ that, loving Him and believing in Him, they rejoice “with joy inexpressible and full of glory” (1 Peter 1:8).
Here opens the distinction that separates those centuries from ours: they discovered, while we, born into the faith, inherit. Discovery and inheritance are not opposed in themselves, for the handing down of tradition is the very life of the Church. But an inheritance fulfills its purpose only when it is opened. An unopened dowry chest enriches no one, however much gold lies inside, and fascination is not passed on by heredity. No one is amazed by what he has never discovered.
The Lord Himself showed this, and He showed it in His own flesh. In Nazareth, where He had grown up, His neighbors saw in Him only the inventory of the familiar: the carpenter, the son of Mary, the neighbor they had known all their lives. “A prophet is not without honor except in his own country” (Mark 6:4). And the consequence is recorded with a soberness that chills: “Now He could do no mighty work there” (Mark 6:5). The only unbelief at which Christ marvels in the Gospels is not that of the pagans, but that of those who knew Him too well. Familiarity is not knowledge. It is often the most stubborn form of blindness, because it does not know itself to be blind.
Joy That Misses Its Mark
To the loss of joy is added its misunderstanding — the confusion we fall into when we believe ourselves joyful without being so. A distinction is needed here. The joy we are speaking of is joy in Jesus Christ and in Him alone. And this requires that joy rise all the way to Him, not stop at His gifts. The gifts are good and they too come from Him; but when joy stays with them and does not rise to the One who gives them, it stops halfway along the road.
A word from the Desert Fathers shows where this joy begins. Abba Alonius said that unless he should say in his heart that only he and God are in this world, he would find no rest. This is not contempt for people, nor solitude for its own sake, but the gathering of the soul into the one relation that holds it: the relation with God. When the soul scatters itself among a thousand cares and blames cast upon others, it loses its stillness; and where there is no stillness, joy has no room, for an unrested soul has nowhere to receive it. Rest is born of having God as one’s only center, and out of rest joy is born. He who has no inner peace cannot rejoice, however much he may possess.
A joy turned toward oneself, however spiritual it may appear, is not this joy, and joy with the wrong object has no worth before God. The Lord showed this to His own disciples, in an hour of victory.
The seventy disciples, sent out to preach, return full of joy: “Lord, even the demons are subject to us in Your name” (Luke 10:17). They speak the Lord’s name, but the weight of their words falls on “subject to us.” Their joy had slid from the Name onto themselves — onto their new power, their success. They were not rejoicing over those set free, nor over God made known through signs, but that the miracles had been worked through them.
The Lord turns them back gently but firmly. First He reminds them whose the gift is: “I give you the authority to trample on serpents and scorpions” (Luke 10:19) — power given, not their own. Then He moves their joy from the gift to the Giver: “Nevertheless do not rejoice in this, that the spirits are subject to you, but rather rejoice because your names are written in heaven” (Luke 10:20).
And it is worth noticing where exactly He sends them. He does not say “rejoice for those who were healed,” nor “rejoice that the Name is being proclaimed,” though both would have been purer joys than the joy of self. He passes beyond them all, straight to belonging: your names, written in heaven. For even the work done for God can become an idol in the place of God. The only joy that cannot be corrupted is the joy of being His.
Here lies a sickness few guard against: you can rejoice in church over achievements, over rules fulfilled, over prayers answered, over saints who have solved your troubles — and never yet have rejoiced in God.
The Means Without the Person
One might think that joy faded as the Church became an institution, with hierarchy, Mysteries, and order. That would be an error, and the life of the first community disproves it. Immediately after Pentecost, the Christians “continued steadfastly in the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in prayers” (Acts 2:42), and joy is bound to this order, not opposed to it: breaking bread, they “ate their food with gladness and simplicity of heart” (Acts 2:46).
The prototype had been given by the Lord on the road to Emmaus. The hearts of the two disciples burn as the Scriptures are opened to them, but their eyes are opened only at the table: He “was known to them in the breaking of bread” (Luke 24:35). Word and Breaking, the burning of the heart and the opening of the eyes. This is the structure of every Liturgy you have ever attended. The meeting with the Risen One did not take place alongside the Church’s order, but within it.
The difference between that age and ours, then, does not lie in the means, for they are the same. It lies in how they are lived. A Mystery is like a window: through it you look at Christ, and His light passes into your life. When the window comes to be treated as a wall to lean on, or as an item to be checked off, the light no longer passes, though the window itself is unchanged. The means have not broken. The gaze has descended from Christ to the things through which He gives Himself.
This sickness is old, and the Church has fought it within herself. Saint Symeon the New Theologian rose against those who thought it enough to have the Mysteries and the order, without the conscious experience of grace and without meeting Christ in this life — and he paid for it with exile. Saint Nicholas Cabasilas showed in his turn that the Mysteries are not signs of a union accomplished elsewhere: they are the very union with Christ. Precisely the deepest teachers of the Mysteries bear witness that a Mystery lived without seeking the Person is betrayed in its very purpose.
And the clearest sign of this shift is a question. The day of many believers closes with “Have I done my prayer rule?” — not “Have I sought Him?” The rule is kept, sometimes scrupulously, but the One for whose sake the rule exists is no longer awaited within it.
The Saints: Followed or Used
The same descent of the gaze can be seen, perhaps most clearly, in devotion to the saints. Their veneration and the asking of their intercession are Orthodox to the core, and their miracles are real and are to be asked for with boldness. The sickness is not the asking. The sickness is the reduction of the saint to a supplier of solutions.
The signs are easy to recognize: the akathist read as a request form, with the eyes on the solution rather than on the one praised in it; relics sought out like a dispensary, with a queue and a list of troubles; the saint chosen from the calendar according to the need of the day. All of this can go hand in hand with total ignorance of the one being asked. The saint you last asked for something — do you know how he lived, what he died for, what he loved most?
For the lives of the saints are the documents of the discovery. Every saint’s life is the chronicle of a man who discovered Christ and could no longer live as before; the miracles are only the seal. Read in this way, the lives are contagious, for they show that the discovery is possible in every age and at every stage of life. Used as a dispensary, they fall silent. The true icon of all veneration remains the Mother of God: the most honored of all creatures speaks a single command in the Gospel, and it points not to herself but to her Son: “Whatever He says to you, do it” (John 2:5). The difference between asking something of a saint and following him is the difference between using and loving.
Where Joy Has Not Disappeared
That this is not a loss without return is shown by something simple: the joy of the first centuries reappears, unchanged, whenever its conditions are restored — that is, whenever faith becomes costly again, or the search becomes personal again.
The communist prisons of the last century restored, almost literally, the conditions of the age of the martyrs, and with them they restored the same joy, incomprehensible to those outside. Nicolae Steinhardt, baptized in prison, titled the book of his testimony “Jurnalul fericirii” — The Diary of Happiness — and the title alone is a document: happiness found exactly where everything had been lost, by a man who was discovering, not inheriting. On Athos, in those same decades, Saint Silouan came out of years of struggle with despair weeping with love for the whole world, and Saint Porphyrios repeated to the end that Christ is man’s joy.
The same happens today with those who discover the faith in adulthood. If you have ever spoken with a true convert, you have seen in his eyes exactly what you are seeking: the joy that inheritors of many generations no longer have. The same faith, the same Mysteries, the same Liturgy. One difference only: the discovery.
And within the Tradition, whenever joy has gone out among the multitude, the Church has drawn up from her own depths the movement that rekindles it, and every such movement has been a return to the living encounter. Hesychasm, defended by Saint Gregory Palamas; the Kollyvades, who fought for frequent Communion; and running through them all, unceasing, the Jesus Prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” Direct address, by name, to a Person. The cure has never been outside the Tradition. It has been, every time, in its depths.
Not Reform, but Return
This whole diagnosis is written in Scripture from the beginning, and the remedy stands there as well. To the Church of Ephesus the Lord acknowledges everything: the works, the labor, the patience, the right faith. And yet: “I have this against you, that you have left your first love” (Revelation 2:4). And the command that follows has three steps, none of them demolition: “Remember therefore from where you have fallen; repent and do the first works” (Revelation 2:5). Remembrance, repentance, return to the first works. Not reform, for nothing that Ephesus had needed changing. Not techniques of revival, for the first love cannot be manufactured. But return to the place where it was born.
And the parable the Lord set upon this very return shows that repentance is not the enemy of joy but its door. The prodigal son does not come back cheerful. He comes back broken, with a servant’s speech prepared on the road, and discovers that the Father was waiting for him. The gladness in that house is not brought by the son; it is commanded by the Father: “he was lost and is found” (Luke 15:24). Christian joy is not only the wonder of the first discovery. It is also the joy of the one who is found.
That is why the Church does not ask you to manufacture your joy. She asks you to return. Joy is not a deed you can produce by willpower; it is a response. You do not seek it directly, for it will not be caught when hunted. You seek the One from whom it is born, and it comes over and above, unowed, when you are not even looking.
I Do Not Know the Cure, but I Know It Must Be Sought
Here, perhaps, the recipe should follow. Five steps, a method, an ending to send you home settled. I do not have one. It would be dishonest to write otherwise.
I have written about this sickness because I know it from myself, not from books. I recognize in myself the Christian who confesses the Resurrection without living its victory, who comes to the window and looks at the window, who does his prayer rule without seeking Him. Of the sickness I can speak, because it is mine. Of the cure I can only point to where those who found it were looking, because I am seeking it myself. Whoever promises you joy in a few steps is selling it to you. I can only tell you what I have lost, and where others have found what I do not yet possess.
One thing I suspect, and I write it as a suspicion, not as a teaching. Perhaps the return does not begin with a feeling but with a decision. Perhaps a beginning of vigil, a fast truly kept, a few verses of the Gospel read slowly in the morning, an hour of the Prayer of the Heart said with attention — not in order to feel something, but simply to seek the One you are addressing — are a step toward the place where joy is given. Not because these things produce it. Joy hunted directly hides itself, and if you take up ascetic effort in order to feel good, you have fallen back into the joy of the seventy: you rejoice in your own result, not in God. You do them because you are seeking Him. The rest no longer depends on you.
Saint Seraphim of Sarov said that the aim of the Christian life is the acquisition of the Holy Spirit, not the acquisition of joy. Joy is the sign that you have found Him, not the target you run toward. Perhaps this is exactly where most of us go wrong: we seek joy, when we ought to be seeking Him.
“Your joy no one will take from you” (John 16:22), the Lord said on the night of the betrayal, to men who would flee within the hour. It came to pass exactly so: no one took it. No one has taken yours either. It lies unclaimed, in the unopened inheritance. The way back is the way of Emmaus, and it stands open every day: the Scriptures at which the heart catches fire, and the breaking of bread at which the eyes are opened. I am walking it too, with the steps I have. I do not know whether I write from its end. I know only that it is the way, and that it leads nowhere else but to Him.
References
Holy Scripture: Mark 6:1–6; Luke 10:17–21; 15:11–32; 24:13–35; John 2:5; 16:22; 20:28; Acts 2:42–46; 1 Peter 1:8; Revelation 2:1–5.
Sources and authors:
- The Sayings of the Desert Fathers (Abba Alonius, on rest).
- Saint John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, Step 7 (on joy-making mourning).
- Saint Symeon the New Theologian, The Catechetical Discourses.
- Saint Nicholas Cabasilas, The Life in Christ.
- Saint Gregory Palamas, The Triads in Defense of the Holy Hesychasts.
- Saint Nicodemus the Hagiorite and Saint Macarius of Corinth, Concerning Frequent Communion of the Immaculate Mysteries of Christ.
- The Philokalia (on the Jesus Prayer).
- Archimandrite Sophrony (Sakharov), Saint Silouan the Athonite.
- Saint Porphyrios, Wounded by Love: The Life and the Wisdom of Saint Porphyrios.
- Nicolae Steinhardt, Jurnalul fericirii (The Diary of Happiness).
- Saint Seraphim of Sarov, On the Acquisition of the Holy Spirit (the conversation with Motovilov).
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